Saturday, September 5, 2009

Let's get lost

I am constructing a 1/72 scale diorama in my basement. It is a speculative rendering of the post-apocalyptic landscape of the city I live in. It now consumes most of the space in my cellar, occupying the scale equivalent of three or four square miles.

The buildings are mostly scratch-built, dozens of commercial strip shacks transformed into lonely bunkers for the degenerate hoardings of the human detritus who conduct daily scavenger hunts in the abandoned shopping plazas. Irregularly outfitted armored personnel carriers plod their way through the potholes of parking lots, scrounging for serviceable parts. The figures, most of them plastic toy soldiers modified to neutralize their otherwise obvious aspect as 18th Century hussars or cold war commandos, are often hidden from each other in their desolate post-industrial human dens, underneath rusted manhole covers (indeed, the underground maze I have postulated and constructed is even more elaborate than the surface world). Pith-helmeted expeditioners roam a dying desert of grit, broken glass, and metal fragments, crunching bone underfoot. With careful scrutiny one can find them half-hidden, with scoped rifles braced against collapsed telephone poles, looking for carrion-feeding crows and vultures to drop from the sky. Currently, the human population is 23.